Relativity Read online

  Sometimes I wonder if I’m in the right line of work. I know, I know—what a crazy thing to be thinking. I mean, my parents knew from my infant reading that I’d grow up to have an aptitude for puzzle-solving, plus superior powers of observation. They made sure I had every opportunity to fulfill my potentials, and when I had my sooth read for myself at eighteen, it was obvious that this would be a perfect job for me to pursue. And yet, still, I have my doubts. I just don’t feel like a cop sometimes.

  But a soothsaying can’t be wrong: almost every human trait has a genetic basis—gullibility, mean-spiritedness, a goofy sense of humor, the urge to collect things, talents for various sports, every specific sexual predilection (according to my own sooth, my tastes ran to group sex with Asian women—so far, I’d yet to find an opportunity to test that empirically).

  Of course, when Mendelia started up, we didn’t yet know what each gene and gene combo did. Even today, the SG is still adding new interpretations to the list. Still, I sometimes wonder how people in other parts of Free Space get along without soothsayers—stumbling through life, looking for the right job; sometimes completely unaware of talents they possess; failing to know what specific things they should do to take care of their health. Oh, sure, you can get a genetic reading anywhere—even down on Earth. But they’re only mandatory here.

  And my mandatory readings said I’d make a good cop. But, I have to admit, sometimes I’m not so sure…

  Rebecca Connolly was at home when I got there. On Earth, a family with the kind of money the Hissock-Connolly union had would own a mansion. Space is at a premium aboard a habitat, but their living room was big enough that its floor showed a hint of curvature. The art on the walls included originals by both Grant Wood and Bob Eggleton. There was no doubt they were loaded—making it all the harder to believe they’d done in Uncle Skye for his money.

  Rebecca Connolly was a gorgeous woman. According to the press reports I’d read, she was forty-four, but she looked twenty years younger. Gene therapy might be impossible here, but anyone who could afford it could have plastic surgery. Her hair was copper-colored, and her eyes an unnatural violet. “Hello, Detective Korsakov,” she said. “My husband told me you were likely to stop by.” She shook her head. “Poor Skye. Such a darling man.”

  I tilted my head. She was the first of Skye’s relations to actually say something nice about him as a person—which, after all, could just be a clumsy attempt to deflect suspicion from her. “You knew Skye well?”

  “No—to be honest, no. He and Rodger weren’t that close. Funny thing, that. Skye used to come by the house frequently when we first got married—he was Rodger’s best man, did he tell you that? But when Glen was born, well, he stopped coming around as much. I dunno—maybe he didn’t like kids; he never had any of his own. Anyway, he really hasn’t been a big part of our lives for, oh, eighteen years now.”

  “But Rodger’s DNA was accepted by Skye’s lock.”

  “Oh, yes. Rodger owns the unit Skye has his current offices in.”

  “I hate to ask you this, but—”

  “I’m on the Board of Directors of TenthGen Computing, Detective. We were having a shareholders’ meeting this morning. Something like eight hundred people saw me there.”

  I asked more questions, but didn’t get any closer to identifying Rodger Hissock’s motive. And so I decided to cheat—as I said, sometimes I do wonder if I’m in the right kind of job. “Thanks for your help, Ms. Connolly. I don’t want to take up any more of your time, but can I use your bathroom before I go?”

  She smiled. “Of course. There’s one down the hall, and one upstairs.”

  The upstairs one sounded more promising for my purposes. I went up to it, and the door closed behind me. I really did need to go, but first I pulled out my forensic scanner and started looking for specimens. Razors and combs were excellent places to find DNA samples; so were towels, if the user rubbed vigorously enough. Best of all, though, were toothbrushes. I scanned everything, but something was amiss. According to the scanner, there was DNA present from one woman—the XX chromosome pair made the gender clear. And there was DNA from one man. But three males lived in this house: father Rodger, elder son Glen, and younger son Billy.

  Perhaps this bathroom was used only by the parents, in which case I’d blown it—I’d hardly get a chance to check out the other bathroom. But no—there were four sets of towels, four toothbrushes, and there, on the edge of the tub, a toy aquashuttle…precisely the kind an eight-year-old boy would play with.

  Curious. Four people obviously used this john, but only two had left any genetic traces. And that made no sense—I mean, sure, I hardly ever washed when I was eight like Billy, but no one can use a washroom day in and day out without leaving some DNA behind.

  I relieved myself, the toilet autoflushed, and I went downstairs, thanked Ms. Connolly again, and left.

  Like I said, I was cheating—making me wonder again whether I really was cut out for a career in law enforcement. Even though it was a violation of civil rights, I took the male DNA sample I’d found in the Hissock-Connolly bathroom to Dana Rundstedt, who read its sooth for me.

  I was amazed by the results. If I hadn’t cheated, I might never have figured it out—it was a damn-near perfect crime.

  But it all fit, after seeing what was in the male DNA.

  The fact that of the surviving Hissocks, only Rodger apparently had free access to Skye’s inner office.

  The fact that Rodger’s blaster was the murder weapon.

  The fact that there were apparently only two people using the bathroom.

  The fact that Skye hated confrontation.

  The fact that the Hissock-Connolly family had a lot of money they wanted to pass on to the next generation.

  The fact that young Glen looked just like his dad, but was subdued and reserved.

  The fact that Glen had gone to a different soothsayer.

  The fact that Rodger’s taste in receptionists was…unusual.

  The pieces all fit—that part of my sooth, at least, must have been read correctly; I was good at puzzling things out. But I was still amazed by how elegant it was.

  Ray Chen would sort out the legalities; he was an expert at that kind of thing. He’d find a way to smooth over my unauthorized soothsaying before we brought this to trial.

  I got in a cab and headed off to Wheel Three to confront the killer.

  “Hold it right there,” I said, coming down the long, gently curving corridor at Francis Crick. “You’re under arrest.”

  Glen Hissock stopped dead in his tracks. “What for?”

  I looked around, then drew Glen into an empty classroom. “For the murder of your uncle, Skye Hissock. Or should I say, for the murder of your brother? The semantics are a bit tricky.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Glen, in that subdued, nervous voice of his.

  I shook my head. Soothsayer Skye had deserved punishment, and his brother Rodger was guilty of a heinous crime—in fact, a crime Mendelian society considered every bit as bad as murder. But I couldn’t let Glen get away with it. “I’m sorry for what happened to you,” I said. The mental scars no doubt explained his sullen, withdrawn manner.

  He glared at me. “Like that makes it better.”

  “When did it start?”

  He was quiet for a time, then gave a little shrug, as if realizing there was no point in pretending any longer. “When I was twelve—as soon as I entered puberty. Not every night, you understand. But often enough.” He paused, then: “How’d you figure it out?”

  I decided to tell him the truth. “There are only two different sets of DNA in your house—one female, as you’d expect, and just one male.”

  Glen said nothing.

  “I had the male DNA read. I was looking for a trait that might have provided a motive for your father. You know what I found.”

  Glen was still silent.

  “When your dad’s sooth was read just after birth, maybe his
parents were told that he was sterile. Certainly the proof is there, in his DNA: an inability to produce viable sperm.” I paused, remembering the details Rundstedt had explained to me. “But the soothsayer back then couldn’t have known the effect of having the variant form of gene ABL-4l9d, with over a hundred T-A-T repeats. That variation’s function hadn’t been identified that long ago. But it was known by the time Rodger turned eighteen, by the time he went to see his big brother Skye, by the time Skye gave him his adult soothsaying.” I paused. “But Uncle Skye hated confrontation, didn’t he?”

  Glen was motionless, a statue.

  “And so Skye lied to your dad. Oh, he told him about his sterility, all right, but he figured there was no point in getting into an argument about what that variant gene meant.”

  Glen looked at the ground. When at last he did speak, his voice was bitter. “I had thought Dad knew. I confronted him—Christ sakes, Dad, if you knew you had a gene for incestuous pedophilia, why the hell didn’t you seek counseling? Why the hell did you have kids?”

  “But your father didn’t know, did he?”

  Glen shook his head. “That bastard Uncle Skye hadn’t told him.”

  “In fairness,” I said, “Skye probably figured that since your father couldn’t have kids, the problem would never come up. But your dad made a lot of money, and wanted it to pass to an heir. And since he couldn’t have an heir the normal way…”

  Glen’s voice was full of disgust. “Since he couldn’t have an heir the normal way, he had one made.”

  I looked the boy up and down. I’d never met a clone before. Glen really was the spitting image of the old man—a chip off the old block. But like any dynasty, the Hissock-Connolly clan wanted not just an heir, but an heir and a spare. Little Billy, ten years younger than Glen, was likewise an exact genetic duplicate of Rodger Hissock, produced from Rodger’s DNA placed into one of Rebecca’s eggs. All three Hissock males had indeed left DNA in that bathroom—exactly identical DNA.

  “Have you always known you were a clone?” I asked.

  Glen shook his head. “I only just found out. Before I went for my adult soothsaying, I wanted to see the report my parents had gotten when I was born. But none existed—my dad had decided to save some money. He didn’t need a new report done, he figured; my sooth would be identical to his, after all. When I went to get my sooth read and found that I was sterile, well, it all fell into place in my mind.”

  “And so you took your father’s blaster, and, since your DNA is the same as his…”

  Glen nodded slowly. His voice was low and bitter. “Dad never knew in advance what was wrong with him—never had a chance to get help. Uncle Skye never told him. Even after Dad had himself cloned, Skye never spoke up.” He looked at me, fury in his cold gray eyes. “It doesn’t work, dammit—our whole way of life doesn’t work if a soothsayer doesn’t tell the truth. You can’t play the hand you’re dealt if you don’t know what cards you’ve got. Skye deserved to die.”

  “And you framed your dad for it. You wanted to punish him, too.”

  Glen shook his head. “You don’t understand, man. You can’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “I didn’t want to punish Dad—I wanted to protect Billy. Dad can afford the best damn lawyer in Mendelia. Oh, he’ll be found guilty, sure, but he won’t get life. His lawyer will cut it down to the minimum mandatory sentence for murder, which is—”

  “Ten years,” I said, realization dawning. “In ten years, Billy will be an adult—and out of danger from Rodger.”

  Glen nodded once.

  “But Rodger could have told the truth at any time—revealed that you were a clone of him. If he’d done that, he would have gotten off, and suspicion would have fallen on you. How did you know he wasn’t going to speak up?”

  Glen sounded a lot older than his eighteen years. “If Dad exposed me, I’d expose him—and the penalty for child molestation is also a minimum ten years, so he’d be doing the time anyway.” He looked directly at me. “Except being a murderer gets you left alone in jail, and being a pedophile gets you wrecked up.” I nodded, led him outside, and hailed a robocab.

  Mendelia is a great place to live, honest.

  And, hell, I did solve the crime, didn’t I? Meaning I am a good detective. So I guess my soothsayer didn’t lie to me.

  At least—at least I hope not…

  I had a sudden cold feeling that the SG would stop footing the bill long before this case could come to public trial.

  The Shoulders of Giants

  I love to get out into the country to write, and most of this story was written at a cottage my wife and I had rented near Parry Sound, Ontario; during the same cottage trip, I wrote the outline for my Neanderthal Parallax trilogy of novels. The germ for this story came from Marshall T. Savage’s fascinating nonfiction book The Millennial Project, in which he said only a fool would set out for a long space voyage on a generation ship…

  This story ended up being the lead piece in the anthology Star Colonies, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers. Edo van Belkom and Robert Charles Wilson are two of my closest friends in the Toronto SF-writing community; Star Colonies marked the first time any of us had appeared together in the same anthology with new (rather than reprint) stories, making it rather a special book for the three of us.

  It seemed like only yesterday when I’d died, but, of course, it was almost certainly centuries ago. I wish the computer would just tell me, dammitall, but it was doubtless waiting until its sensors said I was sufficiently stable and alert. The irony was that my pulse was surely racing out of concern, forestalling it speaking to me. If this was an emergency, it should inform me, and if it wasn’t, it should let me relax.

  Finally, the machine did speak in its crisp, feminine voice. “Hello, Toby. Welcome back to the world of the living.”

  “Where—” I’d thought I’d spoken the word, but no sound had come out. I tried again. “Where are we?”

  “Exactly where we should be: decelerating toward Soror.”

  I felt myself calming down. “How is Ling?”

  “She’s reviving, as well.”

  “The others?”

  “All forty-eight cryogenics chambers are functioning properly,” said the computer. “Everybody is apparently fine.”

  That was good to hear, but it wasn’t surprising. We had four extra cryochambers; if one of the occupied ones had failed, Ling and I would have been awoken earlier to transfer the person within it into a spare. “What’s the date?”

  “16 June 3296.”

  I’d expected an answer like that, but it still took me back a bit. Twelve hundred years had elapsed since the blood had been siphoned out of my body and oxygenated antifreeze had been pumped in to replace it. We’d spent the first of those years accelerating, and presumably the last one decelerating, and the rest—

  —the rest was spent coasting at our maximum velocity, 3,000 km/s, one percent of the speed of light. My father had been from Glasgow; my mother, from Los Angeles. They had both enjoyed the quip that the difference between an American and a European was that to an American, a hundred years was a long time, and to a European, a hundred miles is a big journey.

  But both would agree that twelve hundred years and 11.9 light-years were equally staggering values. And now, here we were, decelerating in toward Tau Ceti, the closest sunlike star to Earth that wasn’t part of a multiple-star system. Of course, because of that, this star had been frequently examined by Earth’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But nothing had ever been detected; nary a peep.

  I was feeling better minute by minute. My own blood, stored in bottles, had been returned to my body and was now coursing through my arteries, my veins, reanimating me.

  We were going to make it.

  Tau Ceti happened to be oriented with its north pole facing toward Sol; that meant that the technique developed late in the twentieth century to detect planetary systems based on subtle blueshifts and redshifts
of a star tugged now closer, now farther away, was useless with it. Any wobble in Tau Ceti’s movements would be perpendicular, as seen from Earth, producing no Doppler effect. But eventually Earth-orbiting telescopes had been developed that were sensitive enough to detect the wobble visually, and—

  It had been front-page news around the world: the first solar system seen by telescopes. Not inferred from stellar wobbles or spectral shifts, but actually seen. At least four planets could be made out orbiting Tau Ceti, and one of them—

  There had been formulas for decades, first popularized in the RAND Corporation’s study Habitable Planets for Man. Every science-fiction writer and astrobiologist worth his or her salt had used them to determine the life zones—the distances from target stars at which planets with Earthlike surface temperatures might exist, a Goldilocks band, neither too hot nor too cold.

  And the second of the four planets that could be seen around Tau Ceti was smack-dab in the middle of that star’s life zone. The planet was watched carefully for an entire year—one of its years, that is, a period of 193 Earth days. Two wonderful facts became apparent. First, the planet’s orbit was damn near circular—meaning it would likely have stable temperatures all the time; the gravitational influence of the fourth planet, a Jovian giant orbiting at a distance of half a billion kilometers from Tau Ceti, probably was responsible for that.

  And, second, the planet varied in brightness substantially over the course of its twenty-nine-hour-and-seventeen-minute day. The reason was easy to deduce: most of one hemisphere was covered with land, which reflected back little of Tau Ceti’s yellow light, while the other hemisphere, with a much higher albedo, was likely covered by a vast ocean, no doubt, given the planet’s fortuitous orbital radius, of liquid water—an extraterrestrial Pacific.

  Of course, at a distance of 11.9 light-years, it was quite possible that Tau Ceti had other planets, too small or too dark to be seen. And so referring to the Earthlike globe as Tau Ceti II would have been problematic; if an additional world or worlds were eventually found orbiting closer in, the system’s planetary numbering would end up as confusing as the scheme used to designate Saturn’s rings.